"By telling our stories, by
teaching about the Holocaust
and writing our memoirs, we
force ourselves to recall the
painful past in order to
assure future generations of
children an innocent and happy
childhood free of menacing
violence. Now we want to be
assured that our efforts were
not in vain. We want to live
out our lives secure in the
knowledge that these
inhumanities will never happen
again - not because there are
laws which say they are wrong,
but because PEOPLE say so. It
is people who should admonish
one another with the biblical
command Zachor,
Remember!"

When
we come to the other
world and meet the
millions of Jews who
died in the camps and
they ask us, "What
have you done?" there
will be many answers.
You will say,
"I became a
jeweler." Another
will say, "I smuggled
coffee and American
cigarettes." Still
another will say, "I
built houses," but I
will say, "I didn't
forget you."
-- Simon Wiesenthal

The
First Eyewitness of the
Holocaust: Alfred Weltzler
and Rudolf
Vrba
On April 7, 1944, two
Slovakian Jews,
twenty-six-year-old Alfred
Weltzler and
twenty-year-old Rudolf
Vrba, escaped from
Auschwitz. They provided
the first eyewitness
account of the
concentration and
extermination camp to the
western world, an account
that set off the chain of
events that led to the
Nuremberg trial.

18-year-old
Lilly Jacob was deported with
her family, and most of the
Jews of Hungary, in the spring
of 1944. On the ramp at
Auschwitz she was brutally
separated from her parents and
younger brothers; she never
saw any of them again. She was
lucky and survived; yet, she
was not always convinced of
the blessing of having
survived totally alone, bereft
of family, friends and her
world.Unlike
all of the other survivors,
she was granted a small
miracle. On the day of her
liberation, in the Dora
concentration camp hundreds of
miles from Auschwitz, she
found in the deserted SS
barracks a photo album. It
contained, among others,
pictures of her family and
friends as they arrived on the
ramp and unknowingly awaited
their death. It was a unique
tie to what once had been,
could never return, and could
never be rebuilt.It
was also, as we now know, the
only photographic evidence of
Jews arriving in Auschwitz or
any other death
camp.

Some
Jewish Child
Survivors of the
Holocaust saved via
the Kindertransports
(Child
Transports)

In
November 1938, following the
night of brutal attacks on
Jewish homes across Germany
known as Kristallnacht (night
of broken glass), British
refugee organisations
persuaded the British
government to permit Jewish
children under 17 to come
temporarily to Britain. Each
child's keep, education, and
eventual emigration had to be
paid for by private
individuals. In return, the
government agreed to permit
refugee children to enter the
country on travel visas.
Parents were not allowed to
accompany their
children.Between December 1938
and September 1939, when war
began, thekindertransport trains
brought around 10,000 children
to Britain. Many would never
see their parents
again.

A
photograph of the
nine-year-old Grete Glauber
in the 'Fremdenpass' or
alien passport issued by
the German Third Reich
which allowed her to
migrate from Austria to
England in 1939 as one of
the 'Kindertransport'
children.

Rabbi
Emeritus Laszlo
Berkowits
didn't ask "Where was
God?" after his time
in the German death
camps. The Falls
Church Rabbi thinks a
more useful question
to ask about the
Holocaust is
"Where was man?"<washingtonian.com/about/archive/1996/9609contents.html>

Note:
Julia Brüder (Brueder) is the
Editor's double cousin (her father
with the Editor's father, Herman
Brüder, were brothers and, her
mother was sister with the Editor's
father). She was the only relative,
out of some 60, on the Editor's
father side that survived Auschwitz
and the Holocaust. All three
siblings (Istvan, Eva, and Rozsi
Brüder) of the Editor's father
perished during the transport to
Auschwitz (see under Bruder, this
Reference
Pagefrom
JewishGen).

She
married
Howard
Chandler,
who had survived Auschwitz and
Buchenwald.
They have four children and seven
grandchildren.

.

Riwka
Cohen of The Netherlands
Survived the Holocaust and moved to
the United States.Other info: Her father was
arrested as a hostage after a
resistance attack, the day before
her mother's birthday. Riwka went
into hidding at a farm in the
village of Hellendoorn (Netherlands)
under the name of Marietje van der
Velde. After the war she was
reunited with her mother and sister.
She never saw her father again.Source:
http://www.oorlogsgetuigen.nl/nl/hoofdstuk_1/cohen/cohen.html

"I
have been able to transfer the
horror of the Holocaust in my
art.
Every individual who survived that
other world, has a duty to leave
documentation behind so that future
generations will remember and will
not
forget."Holocaust
Survivor from Kovna, Lithuania and
Israeli Artist Tamara
Deuel.

Max
Ehrlich
(1892-1944) was one of the most
celebrated actors and directors
on the German comedy and cabaret
scene of the 1930s. His brilliant
career was brutally interrupted
by the rise of Nazism that
resulted in him being deported in
1942 to Westerbork concentration
camp in Holland. From there, in
1944, Max
Ehrlich
was transported to Auschwitz
where he was gassed.

.

Lucille
Eichengreen, German Holocaust
Survivor(survived
the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz,
Neuengamme, and Bergen-Belsen to
identify and testify against her
former Nazi captors.)DETAIL:
In
1925, Lucille was born in Hamburg,
Germany and lived with her mother
Sala Landau, and her father,
Benjamin Landau. Her sister, Karin,
was born in 1930. On October 27,
1938, her father was arrested for
the first time, but returned later
in spring of 1939. On the same day
that World War II began, her father
was taken again, but only his ashes
were returned in September 1941.
Lucille was 16 years old in 1941
when her regular schooling ended
after being deported to the
Lódz Ghetto in Poland where
she remained for nearly four years.
Lucille arrived in Auschwitz in
August, 1944 and was later
transferred to the work camp,
Dessauerufer in October 1944. She
was then transported to the slave
labor camp in Neungamme in November
and December of 1944. There, Lucille
and other inmates cleared bombed
buildings and shipyards until the
long walk to Bergen-Belsen in
February and March

David
Faber witnessed the murder of his
parents, brother, and five of his
six sisters. When he was finally
liberated from his eight
concentration camps, he weighed only
72 pounds. Despite these horrors,
David feels very fortunate to have
survived.

Harry
Faiwl with other Holocaust
Survivors from
Ebensee[Mr.
Faiwl, originally from Kalisz,
Poland, imprisoned in Warsaw
ghetto, Czestochowa ghetto -
Hassak labor camp, Bedzin ghetto,
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Swietochowice
and Ebensee, where he was
liberated by the U.S. Army in May
1945]

Ella
Freilich, the mother-in-law of U.S.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, died on
August 6, 2004. She was 87.
Ella and her husband, Samuel, fled
Czechoslovakia as the Communists
came to power. They arrived in the
United States in 1949, a year after
their daughter, Hadassah, was born.
Hadassah and Lieberman are now
married. Born in Rachov,
Czechoslovakia, Ella was the
youngest of four siblings. In 1944,
her family was sent to Auschwitz,
where her mother and two sisters
died. She was liberated in 1945. She
later worked in Prague and in 1947
married her husband, a lawyer and
rabbi who also had survived a Nazi
labor camp. [AP]

It
didn't seem so at the time, but Sala
Garncarz was one of the lucky ones.
When the Nazi invaded Poland in
1939, she was a 16-year-old Jewish
girl living in Sosnowiec, a town
close to German border. She
volunteered to take the place of her
older sister, Raizel, who had been
ordered to report to a Nazi forced
labor camp for six weeks. But the
six weeks stretched into almost five
years of servitude for Sala, in
seven different camps, with a
pittance for wages or none at all,
filthy quarters and an abundance of
typhus-carrying lice. Her luck was
that her labor-worthiness as a
seamstress saved her from Auschwitz,
a main extermination center, where
her parents and other family members
died. The story of Sala (she is
alive and well at 82 and has
grandchildren with her husband of 60
years, Sidney Kirschner) is told in
a stirring new exhibition at the New
York Public Library, which draws on
more than 300 cherished from her
family and friends; and a diary she
managed to squirrel away during her
years of servitude (for a while the
Nazis let forced laborers send and
receive mail, provided it was
written in German). Crucial elements
of her saga --which she kept under
wraps for more than 50 years--
include the protective support of an
older campmate, Ala Gertner,
later hanged at Auschwitz for her
part in an uprising there; the
kindness of a local German family to
whose home she was sent under guard
to use its sawing machine; her close
comradeship with female workers at
various camps; her introduction to
her husband, then a G.I., at a Rosh
Hashana service after the camps were
liberated; her postwar discovery of
her two surviving sisters; and her
emigration as a war bride to the
United States in 1946.
[By
Grace Glueck, Art Listings, The New
York Times, March 10, 2006, p.
B27.]

Gerda
Weissmann Klein (Born in
Bielsko, Poland,1924),
Holocaust survivor
liberated in Czechoslovakia
by U.S. soldier

In
1939, Gerda's
brother was
deported for
forced labor. In
June 1942, Gerda's
family was
deported from the
Bielsko ghetto.
While her parents
were transported
to Auschwitz,
Gerda was sent to
the Gross-Rosen
camp system, where
for the remainder
of the war she
performed forced
labor in textile
factories. Gerda
was liberated
after a death
march, wearing the
ski boots her
father insisted
would help her to
survive.
[USHMM]

The
youngest child of a
middle-class Jewish family
in Oradea, Northwest
Romania, was an eyewitness
to the rise of fascism in
Europe and the horrors of
World War II. She saw and
felt the vicious attitudes
of the ruling Horthy
Hungarian government (that
annexed Northwestern
Romania) at that time as
her family was first
forcibly removed to the
Jewish ghetto in the city
of Oradea (Hungarian,
Nagyvárad), then
deported to the
concentration camp at
Birkenau-Auschwitz. Magda
survived, but lost many of
her family members, a loss
she could not bear. She
became increasingly
reclusive, and in June 1946
she died of an overdose of
medication.

The
poetic journal Magda kept
during those years was
translated from Hungarian
into English by her nice
Susan Simpson Geroe under
the title "Pearls
and
Lace."

Eva
Mozes Kor and her identical
twin, Miriam Mozes born in
Transylvania, Romania.*Survived
the deadly genetic experiments
conducted by The Angel of
Death, the infamous
Dr. Mengele, in the
deathcamp Auschwitz during
1944-1945. In 1950 Eva and
Miriam received visas for
Israel and went there.
Miriam died in 1993 from a
rare form of cancer. Eva,
currently lives in Erre
Hautte, Indiana, USA and is
the founder of the
CANDLES Holocaust Museum.

The
memory of the collaboration between
the Judenrat and the Nazis has
tortured me for years.
How do I dare to call it
collaboration when the Judenrat had
presumably no choice?
I dare because I saw what happened
and I experience it.
I dare because I want to understand
how the Nazis corrupted the
Judenrat, left the Jewish population
leaderless, and expedited the Final
Solution.

"Nothing
belongs to us any more.
They've taken away our
clothes, our shoes, even
our hair. We are more than
stripped bare --we are
naked as worms. If we speak
they will not listen, and
if they listen they will
not understand." --From
Primo Levi's memoir
Survival in
Auschwitz.

Emilian
Lustig (b. July 28, 1928 - ),
Birkenau-Auschwitz and
Dachau (Prisoner No. 11236)
Holocaust Survivor.Worked
for a while as a mechanic at the
Meserschmith Aviation Plant in
Augsburg and then in Tutzing,
Germany.
At the end, he contracted typhus but
was able in three weeks to recover
from it.

Meisel
worked as a slave laborer in a boot
factory in a Lithuanian ghetto,
watched her mother forced into a gas
chamber and posed as a Catholic to
hide from the Nazis before she fled
to safety in Denmark. She was 16
years old and weighed 47
pounds...

... Genia then and
55 years latter
...

Reunited
in New York in 1998 by the
Jewish Foundation for the
Righteous

There's a story from the Holocaust
about some death camp inmates who
decide to put God on trial...
They prepare for several hours,
and then carefully argue the
prosecution and the defense.
No sooner do they find God guilty
for their fates...

Samuel
Broude, Rabbi Emeritus of Oakland's
Temple Sinai, recalling that story to
describe one of his longtime
congregants,René Molho.

(author
of several books whose life's
mission is to raise awareness about
the largely unknown tragedy of the
many camps in Transnistria, and also
of the 284 people who have been
deported from
Bucharest)

Born
on March 20, 1930 in
Dorohoi, Romania, he is the
author of several books on
the Holocaust in Romania
under the Antonescu regime,
most recent one published
in 2004, both in Romanian
and English, by the
Association of the Romanian
Jews Victims of the
Holocaust under the title:
"The Holocaust under the
Antonescu
Government."

A
little Jewish boy, Joseph Schleifstein,
sits on a United Nations Refugee
Relief Agency truck in the KZ camp
Buchenwald. He miraculously survived
the horrors of the Holocaust and was
four years old when American troops
liberated Buchenwald in 1945.

Fred
Spiegel was born in Dinslaken
Germany, in 1932, After
Kristallnacht he was sent to live
with relatives in Holland, When the
Germans invaded Holland, Fred was
sent to three concentration camps:
Vught, Westerbork, and
Bergen-Belsen. On April 13, 1945, he
was liberated by the Americans near
the River Elbe. After the war, Fred
was reunited with his mother and
sister. Since then he has lived in
England, Israel, Chile and the
United States. Retired, Fred now
lectures at schools and colleges
about his experiences as a child
during the Holocaust.

"I
hope for the day when people can
practice their religion of
choice; when race and
discrimination is no longer an
issue..May
the 21st Century, which we have
now embarked, never experience
the horrors of the Century we
have just left behind..May
we be given the strength to build
together with others a world of
security, mutual respect, and
peace."..

Following
the German occupation of Hungary in
March 1944, Bart was forced into a
ghetto established in his home town.
From May to July 1944, the Germans
deported Jews from Hungary to the
Auschwitz extermination camp in
occupied Poland. Bart was deported
by cattle car to Auschwitz. At
Auschwitz, he was selected to
perform forced labor, drilling and
digging in a coal mine. As Soviet
forces advanced toward the Auschwitz
camp in January 1945, the Germans
forced most of the prisoners on a
death march out of the camp. Along
with a number of ill prisoners who
were in the camp infirmary, Bart was
one of the few inmates who remained
in the camp at the time of
liberation. He survived to be
liberated by hiding in the camp even
after many other prisoners had been
forced on a death march in January
1945. [USHMM]

David
was the sole survivor of
the ship "Struma"
(see,
Ref. 1,
Ref 2,
and Ref. 3)
which sailed from
Constanta, Romania on
December 12, 1941 to
Palestine. More than 700
jews were aboard. The ship
was detained by the Turks,
who refused to let the
passengers in. The English
refused them visa for
Palestine. The ship was
towed back to the Black Sea
where it was sunk by a
Russian submarine. David
was hurled overboard and
saved by a commercial
vessel. He was arrested by
the Turks but sent to Syria
after a few months
imprisonment. Later, David
became a member of the
Jewish Brigade of the
English Army.

. .

"Democracies
are extremely fragile. I experienced
the collapse of a free society, the
collapse of democracy. Hitler did
not come to power by force, by
terrorism, but by the rules of
democratic law. The Germans elected
him!"Holocaust
survivor Michel
Thomas

Ater
the Germans occupied
Hungary in 1944, Tom was
ordered to work in labor
camps and factories. He
escaped after a few months
and decided to contact the
Swedish legation, where he
met Raoul Wallenberg in
October 1944. Tom stayed in
Budapest and, using his
training in photography,
became active in
Wallenberg's efforts to
rescue the Jews of
Budapest. He made copies of
and took photographs for
protective passes
(Schutzpaesse), and
documented
deportations.

The
Yosselevska family led a happy life
in the village of Zagorodski, near
Pinsk, highlighted by the births of
the children Chaya, Feige, Rivka and
a brother named Moshe. Their father
had a leather goods shop and was
considered one of the notables of
the village. In the summer of 1942
the Einsatzgruppen arrived. Along
with her little girl, father,
mother, siblings, relatives,
friends, and villagers, Rivka
Yosselevska was shot, naked, in a
pit - miraculously she survived.
During the Adolf Eichmann trial in
Jerusalem, on May 8, 1961, she bore
witness about what
happened.

Pierre
Seel, French Homosexual
that
survivedthe Schirmeck concentration campPierre
Seel is a still living
Frenchman who was deported
to the Schirmeck
concentration camp in 1941.
After the war, in shame, he
hid and in fact married and
had children. In 1982,
spurred by the denouncement
of homosexuals as "sick" by
Msgr. Elchinger, Bishop of
Strasbourg, Pierre Seel
went public with his story.
[http://victim.ww2.klup.info/]

Survived
a forced labour camp, following
which he was sent to Auschwitz,
where he was one of 16 out of 4,000
prisoners to survive the death march
of January 1945. Later, in Israel,
he participated in the Eichmann
trial as part of the Israeli police
detachment, and as assistant to
Gideon Hausner, the chief
prosecutor.

"I
felt terribly guilty for the murders
committed in my family by the SS.
They took me by surprise when I was
playing outside the Mogilov Podolsk
ghetto. This sadist took my little
sister, who was only four months
old, out of my grandmother's arms,
placed her on a stone, and split her
in two with an axe. Then he killed
my grandmother, my aunt, and five of
my cousins. I felt so guilty because
until 1997 I never dared tell my
story. I was afraid that no one
would believe me. Now I have broken
my silence and I weep, and so I
release myself from this terrible
burden of suffering which has
weighed on my conscience all my
life.'"

"Exactly
six years after my liberation from
Buchenwald, on 12 April, 1951, the
chief of staff pinned on my chest
the Israeli Air Force pilot's
emblem. On the same spot where, just
a short while before, I was forced
to wear the yellow star of David
that symbolized disgrace and
humiliation. I was so proud to wear
now the blue star of
David."

"Our
tormentors tried to dehumanize us,
to kill every part of our
personality. They had not reckoned
with our spiritual and intellectual
resistance. And the Germans could
not reduce that to nothing...it was
hope that enabled me to survive and
then presented me with the most
precious of all gifts: a family,
children, grandchildren, all in a
new homeland."

Was
saved twice from certain death in
Estonia. Immediately after the war
he worked helping surviving children
and orphans, continuing his work as
a member of the Ghetto Fighters
Kibbutz in northern Israel. He
returned to Germany several times to
give evidence against Nazi criminals
and is today a member of the
International Commission of
Justice.

To
keep alive not only memory
but also its voices
is a noble undertaking.
- Elie Wiesel

" I
still do not want to talk about
these things. When I do, it is
not like reading a book, it is
having to live through it again,
and I have never wanted to keep
feeling the misery of it. And I
particularly did not want my
children to know, especially
about the sexual parts. I did not
want to explain what I had to do.
It is not nice, nor something
that they have to know. They can
read about these
things "

An
Interview with William
LowenbergGerman/Dutch
survivor of Auschwitz, Dachau - also
slave laborer within the Warsaw
Ghetto[Source:
tellingstories.org - Oral History
Archives Project of The Urban
School, San Francisco, CA,
USA.]

Gloria
Lyon, Auschwitz Holocaust Survivor
-- her story on
audio(Gloria
describes her entrance into
Auschwitz and life within. She
describes how she escaped from being
sent to the gas chamber and her
subsequent moves to different camps.
) She is a Czechoslovakian survivor
of 7 camps including Auschwitz,
Bergen-Belsen, Beendorf and
Ravensbrück.[Source:
tellingstories.org - Oral History
Archives Project of The Urban
School, San Francisco, CA,
USA.]

Karl
LyonGerman
refugee who experienced the rise of
Nazism and returns to Germany as an
American soldier to fight against
the Nazis[Source:
tellingstories.org - Oral History
Archives Project of The Urban
School, San Francisco, CA,
USA.]

.

Freda
Rosenfarb
Reider,Austrian
child refugee who experienced the
Anschluss and fled to the United
States in 1939[Source:
tellingstories.org - Oral History
Archives Project of The Urban
School, San Francisco, CA,
USA.]

Prisoners
at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death
camp after their liberation
on January 28, 1945.
(AFP)

.

Three Polish Jews liberated by
the Red Army
-- Auschwitz, Poland,
1945.

In
the afternoon of 27 January,
1945, Red Army soldiers entered
Auschwitz. They found 7,650 weak
and sick prisoners. The Germans'
hasty retreat made it impossible
for them to evict the last
prisoners and force them onto a
"death march". The Russians
documented the horrific scenes
they witnessed, in thousands of
pictures and many
films.

"Walking
corpses" was how a US Army
photographer described the group
of 68 women from Budapest,
Hungary found by soldiers of the
3rd Battalion of the US Army in
the Fenig camp, Germany. They had
been starved and worked to death
in a factory for aircraft parts.
The women, several of them dying,
were transferred to a German Air
Force hospital for treatment.
[This
photograph was one of those
distributed by the Allies for
explanatory purposes.] --
From Yad Vashem
Archives.

.

Surviving
children of the Auschwitz camp walk out of
the children's barracks.

.

Jewish
women who survived the slave labor
camps.

.

Women
inmates at Birkenau-Auschwitz after Soviet
soldiers liberate the camp on
January 27, 1945.

.

Buchenwald
Survivors at Liberation in April
1945

These four Jewish detainees were
photographed four weeks
after the arrival of US troops in
Buchenwald. [Gedenkstätte
Buchenwald]

Prisoners
of the Block/Barrack 61 at liberation
[AFP/Spiegel]

Margaret
Bourke-White's famous photographs at the
liberation of
Buchenwald.(published
in the May 7, 1945, issue of
Life magazine)

.

Prisoners at liberation in front of
Block/Barack 62.
[Gedenkstätte
Buchenwald]

Surviving
children from Buchenwald at
liberation.[Gedenkstätte
Buchenwald]

A
group of survivors in Buchenwald at
liberation.

The
man in the middle has lifted his
trousers to show the effects of
malnutrition to the photographer.
[U.S.
National
Archives]

.

Following
the liberation, prisoners prepare food in
the Dachau camp.

.

4.
Memorials and Celebrations to Life in the
Shadows of Death and Destruction

January
27, 1945 -- the liberation of
Auschwitz-Birkenau by soldiers of
the Soviet Army
<http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/gallery/p538.htm>
/
<sundweb.com/Danmark/home.htm>

Emaciated
Jewish survivors, who
had been confined to
the infirmary
barracks at Ebensee,
are gathered outside
on
May 7, 1945,
the day after
liberation. The
survivor at
center-left holding
his metal name tag is
Joachim Friedner, a
21-year-old Polish
Jew from
Krakow.
http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=CvX0BJWyom4&offerid=44444.1008515365&type=2&subid=0

.

Some
of the most
difficult
photographs
from the
Holocaust
were those
taken by the
Allied
liberating
forces upon
entering the
camps. The
liberating
soldiers
were met by
masses of
corpses and
tens of
thousands of
prisoners
who were on
the brink of
death. Yet,
for the
Jews,
liberation
did not
bring
unequivocal
relief. They
would not
and could
not return
home; there
was no home
other than
bloody
graveyards
and rubble.
Emigration
was blocked
by strict
immigration
laws around
the world,
and the
survivors'
demands to
be allowed
into
Palestine
were
resisted by
the British
Mandatory
authorities.